


Death is a Close Friend of Mine

by Merimias



Series: Turris Babel [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Drabble, M/M, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:18:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7623805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merimias/pseuds/Merimias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Clint sees her, he's ten years old.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death is a Close Friend of Mine

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, just a short drabble and world-building piece. I highly recommend you read "Wait for It" first, or you'll miss a lot of context regarding stuff. None of my works are beta-d, so if there are any errors let me know and I'll fix them. Enjoy!

The first time Clint sees her, he's ten. His father is a Southsider, Chicago born and bred, and was fonder of his merry band of misfits than of his own children. Apparently he had been heavily involved in the shady business in Canaryville in his youth, something that he would rant on about when straddling the thin, arguably nonexistent line between happy-drunk and angry-drunk. So when one of his mates finally hit the sack in a shootout, it was a given that the Bartons had to attend the funeral. To be honest, it was a pleasant switch from the alcoholic drunkard with a bad case of Siberian Tiger daemon that he and Barney knew. They had driven all the way back to Illinois to pay their respects, staying at a motel at the edge of the neighborhood. It was dank and dirty, but it was cheap, not that Clint cared about any of that. The only reason he's happy is because he can spend the week without bruises for once.

Clint’ll take what he can get though, so he makes full use of the mini-vacation to Chicago to explore. Barney is otherwise occupied, having melted away somewhere at the break of dawn with no way with Clint to contact him, so he’s on his own for the day. Fradharc has taken the form of a small Arctic wolf, loping by his side as he roamed the streets, gazing curiously at the small-town vibe that reminded Clint eerily of his home in Iowa, but darker somehow. The streets were lined with litter, and Clint could see the pale shape of addicts huddled in the alleyway. Clint is very aware of the heavy atmosphere that pressed down on him, the miasma that screams _outsider outsider outsider_. Clint is also very aware that he's being watched, and being assessed as a target. Unfortunately for Canaryville, after the upbringing he's had, Clint can’t give a flying fuck.

He stops outside the house where he knows the funeral being held, taking in the sloppily painted banner saying: Funeral of Ivan Milkovich. Milkovich, he thinks. Sounds Russian. The house is run-down, filled with trash in the front yard that’s probably leftovers from whatever drinking binge the mourners had gone on the previous night. Funny way of showing your respect, that.

“You shouldn’t go in.” Fradharc whispers to him, her fur standing slightly on end. She’s right though, going in would mean having to deal with their father, and Clint isn’t ready to deal with his drunk father on his own yet, if ever. That way leads to pain. Absentmindedly, Clint lifts a hand to smooth over the rough patch on Fradharc's neck, and he sees her.

She’s Indian, her skin a deep rich brown that gleam in the August sun. Her eyes shine with a sparkling light, and her raven black hair is braided in a graceful arc that sweeps around her tall frame. On her shoulder, a raven rests, regarding Clint with a beaded eye. He feels distinctly judged. Clint, for the life of him, cannot tell what she’s wearing, because he’s never seen anything like it. If he could, he’d best describe it as a dress, woven sky blue, but was gilded in a way a smalltown boy had never borne witness to. She is beautiful, unearthly even.

She also has four arms.

Clint is about to scream when he feels Fradharc nudges his side, shaking her head slightly. When he looks up, the woman has a wane smile, and vanishes in a flurry of black feathers. The only thing that keeps Clint from checking himself into an asylum is the fact that Fradharc is shivering. They never speak of it, not to the youngest Milkovich when he comes out the door with another wolf beside him and sees Clint staring glassy-eyed on the porch, not to Barney when Clint doesn’t say a word to him for the next week, and certainly not to each other. The incident is pushed to the very recesses of his memory, begging to be forgotten.

When Fradharc settles a month later, the strange woman with four arms is left behind in the mess that follows.

  **Iowa, USA (1995)**

The next time he sees her, he’s in the carnival. He's learnt to scrounge and steal to survive. The world has beaten him down a little, but he's on his way back up. They’ve stopped in Iowa, Clint’s hometown, and Clint’s taken the time to sneak away in the dead of night to visit his old home. He's dressed in his street clothes, a brown hoodie over a ratty T-shirt and jeans. Funnily enough, the key to surviving on the streets is not to look poor, because that makes you a target. It's to look somewhere in-between, someone that's not worth the effort to hurt. Clint's learnt this the hard way in the orphanage. Barney’s absent, probably off shacking up another girl, so he’s on his own. Again. Barney’s been avoiding him recently, if Clint’d stop to think about it. Absentmindedly, Clint wonders whether he should check up on what his brother's been up to. Fradharc sits on her perch by his shoulder, gazing intently at the roof that covered their own private hell.

It's disconcerting, and brings back some really shitty memories. _You miserable excuse for a Barton!_ rings in his head, and Clint feels a stab of phantom pain for the beer bottle that followed. “We shouldn’t have come back.” Clint says, and Fradharc just hoots softly and rubs her head against his cheek. Really, there’s nothing to say. For all that Clint had grown up in downtown Iowa, he may as well have lived in the ghetto his dad came from for all the good it did him. There’s nothing for him here. There never was.

He hears her song before he sees her. A haunting melody that swirls around him, crystal clear despite his partial deafness. It sounds ancient, eldritch beyond measure, a ringing sound that echoes throughout history.

_Aur jab ek yuvak ne mujhase kahata hai ki ,_

_Mera chehara vah jald hee bhool jaoge._

_Main isase pahale ki ham bhaag behatar rona chaahate hain,_

_Unhonne kaha ki abhee tak yah paalan karane ke lie ichchhuk ho jaega._

She’s sitting on the dilapidated roof, plucking at an instrument that vaguely resembles a guitar. The best analogue Clint has is the Sitar that Old Baba, the resident ‘magician’, plays, but this isn’t it. The notes that fly from the strings are resonant, resounding in Clint’s core and shaking it. He remembers Chicago, and he remembers the feeling of _wrong_ that seeped through his skin. He recognizes it now as coming into contact with something that  _cannot be human_. Fradharc screeches, and he takes the warning to run.

Old Baba dies that night.

He doesn’t see her again after that for decades. When Barney leaves him in the dirt he could swear that there was a girl with four arms standing in in the distance, tears streaming down her face in the rain, but he can never be sure. In the decade that follows her song follows him. It’s opening chords precede every hit he makes. He’s fairly certain he’d have gone mad by now, but somewhere between Seoul and Ukraine he begins to find the song comforting. Hell, Fradharc catches him singing it himself, once or twice, and she hums along, birdsong mingling with human voice. Somewhere along the line he stops viewing the strange woman with four arms as something to feared, probably because he figures that if she wanted him dead, he'd be dead already. Besides, nothing's scarier than the cruelty of a human.

Somewhere, along the strange line that is his life, he's begun to consider the girl and her haunting melody a companion of sorts. Sure, she may not be real, and she may be a figment of Clint's incredibly damaged brain, and if she's actually real it bears implications that Clint does not want to think about, but he'll take what he can get. So every time he makes a hit, he makes sure to stop and listen for that haunting melody, and sing a verse to the loss of life by his bloodied hands.

**Berlin, Germany (2007)**

Phil catches him singing it once, on an Op. He’s sitting on the roof, taking a quiet moment to watch the red sunrise before they have to evacuate the safehouse. He knows Coulson’s there, watching him, but he can’t be bothered to respond yet. He hears the opening chords floating through the air, and he sings.

_Oh the snow it melts the soonest,_

_When the winds begin to sing,_

_And the corn that ripens fastest when,_

_The frosts are settling in._

He hears the rustle of fabric, and Phil sits beside him. He's reminded of the first time this happened, just over a year ago when he first learned that he was special in a way that was unmatched, when Coulson became _Phil_. He leans into Phil slightly, as Fradharc takes her customary place on Phil’s shoulder and Chulainn settles on his lap. It’s been a long couple of days, and Clint’s more than ready to head back to base and debrief, but here and now, in a shining moment of peace in Clint’s patchwork of a life, he feels content.

“What was that?” Phil asks, his voice rumbling through Clint’s body.

Clint smiles wanely, and evades. He’s not even sure whether that girl with four arms, all those years ago, or the song at the edges of his hearing, are real, and he’s not about to risk his budding relationship with Phil over what may just be a delusional product of a bad childhood. Besides, Clint is used to keeping his cards close to his chest.

“It’s just an old song I used to hear.”

Phil doesn't respond, and they spend the next twenty minutes in the solace of each other's company. It's...nice. Clint's never been big on the usual displays of romance. He's never much bought into the sex and the dinners and all that shit. It's not something that a poor orphan street kid would really think about. Besides, being openly gay on the street? That's asking to be killed. What he likes the most is the coexistence, the peaceful kind of harmony that he's established with Phil as he buries himself into the man's shoulder, taking in his faint scent of cologne and shampoo. It should not be comforting at all, but it somehow is. 

Phil doesn't ask again, and Clint doesn't tell.

Over the years Clint and Phil grow closer and closer. They go on ops, they get coffee, and they build a life together, in the weird life they both share in SHIELD. One night he finally gets the courage to tell him. It's around midnight, and they're on a cruise ship in the Indian Ocean in the middle of an infiltration op. They're lying in bed together, their bodies a hopeless mess of limbs. He tells Phil about the strange woman with four arms, and Phil nods because he already knows. They've spotted the strange woman intermittently dating back to prehistory, but have no way to contact or track her down. Phil supposes that it just proves that Clint is all the more special, since this strange woman seems to have taken a liking to him. Clint falls asleep to warm eyes and intertwined hands. 

Over the years the song continues, but Clint begins to notice the ravens. Sometimes they perch where he’s currently scoping, sometimes he spots them flying overhead after a shot, but they’re always there. Two midnight black crows, with only one eye each, that watch and observe him. Thinking back, they've always been there, and where they are, so is the strange girl and her song. Clint supposes they're related in some way, but his research never brings up anything, so he lets it slide. When he asks Phil, he's just as interested, Chulainn relentlessly grilling Clint for every instance where he's seen the ravens. They notice that when the ravens caw, it usually means shit's about to hit the fan and something's about to go horribly wrong. That little piece of knowledge saves Clint more than once.

**Maine, USA (2008)**

The instant he hears a raven's caw, he hits the ground. A nano second later, the safehouse explodes around him.

"Fuck!" Clint curses, dragging himself to his feet. Phil's and Natasha are safe, slowly picking themselves off the ground as an entire platoon of the Russian mafia bears down on them. Natasha nods at him, and melts into the shadows with Pustoy. After all this time, Clint isn't sure whether it's an ability like his, or just sheer skill on Natasha's part. When he asks, she just smiles coyly and sweeps his feet from under him. It doesn't really matter how anyway, just that it is. He looks at Phil, and waits for the signal.

This was the plan. They'd let themselves be taken by surprise, and then they'd hit back. Clint would let loose, and Natasha would slide out of the shadows, smoothly appearing and disappearing as she would lay waste to the men in the chaos. In a sad sort of way, Clint pities the mafia. They have no idea what's coming. Offhandedly, he wonders whatever happened to that Milkovich, the one with the wolf all those years ago. Suppose he'll never know.

"We have you surrounded, Подонок!" One of them yells, and they're all smirking like they've won, the idiots. Phil's placid smile twitches slightly, and he gives a faint tilt of his head. Clint grins a feral smile, and the world erupts into wind and fire.

It's a good life.

**Florida, USA (2012)**

He’s not sure what it means, but he can’t help but feel a distinct sense of foreboding when he spots the ravens, cawing at him as he enters the compound.

He's recently recovered from an op gone very bad, and his ribs are still a little sore, so he's on easy missions for now, just a security detail. He's supposed to guard the Tesseract, the shiny blue cube they've managed to recover from Captain America's ship, alongside a couple of other fun stuff that they've salvaged from the mess that was New Mexico. Clint shudders just thinking about it. Still, the presence of the ravens aren't concerning in of themselves, but the fact that they're actually screeching at him incessantly, panic spreading in their beaded eyes.

He can hear their cries loud and clear;  _beware beware! An enemy in the guise of a friend approaches!_ He can feel Fradharc tensing slightly on his shoulder, screeching softly in distress, and Clint knows that something is off. Phil knows too, and he promptly requests for a doubling in security. Later, they confer, but have no clue what the ravens may be alluding to. Even Chulainn, master of solving riddles (it's an unfortunate pastime), is clueless as to what they mean. Still, Phil’s there, and so Clint stays, despite the prickling feeling of danger and anxiety travelling up his spine. He can't leave Phil in the lurch, even if the project might end in disaster. If Phil goes down, he's going down with Coulson too. After all this time, he can't imagine a life without the man anyway, so it's all moot.

It’s just a shiny blue cube anyway, what could possibly go wrong?

 

* * *

 

He sees her after the battle.

Smoke is curling off his fingers, and he remembers being a maelstrom, a living force of nature as he swept through the Chitauri like a vengeful god. He remembers loosing arrow after arrow, each one finding it's mark and erupting into pillars of fire and wind. He remembers Fradharc sweeping around him, pursuing the airborne Chitauri and blowing them off course with hurricanes of wind. He remembers that through it all, through every arrow he fired and Chitauri that dropped, that it was for the fallen. It was for  _him_.

Clint’s seen wargrounds before. He’s seen the blood and bodies and carnage, but never like this. He’s never lost someone on the battlefield before. He never thought, in all his years, that he’d ever get the chance to. He’d never thought he’d be so lucky to ever have someone that mattered so much.

He doesn’t feel lucky now.

He’s on the open walkway of Stark Tower, watching the SHIELD pick through the remains to get rid of the bodies. The sky is grey, and he can feel cold seeping in through his skin, like an icy hand that wrests his heart. Coulson is gone, and he’s alone in a universe that doesn’t make sense anymore, like it’s been tilted off-balance and now Clint has to survive when the rules are different. Fradharc is silent, flames trickling down her feathers in preparation of another attack. It’s good, Clint thinks. At least one of them is doing their job and guarding the machine. Clint isn’t qualified for that, not anymore. He can't even guard his own mind, can't even guard the one thing most precious to him. How qualified is he to do anything now if he can't even save Phi-

He feels her slip through a gap in reality, coming to stand beside him. A crow flutters to Fradharc’s side, slowly pressing against her crimson feathers and not the least bothered by the rivulets of fire streaming through it, and Clint knows. He feels the wind picking up around him, flames dancing at the edge of his vision like a response to his pain. A testament to his loss.

“Give him back.” He croaks, his voice coming out shattered and broken. He can’t lose Coulson. He can’t lose Coulson. He can’t, if he has to beg and kill and cheat. He just can’t lose the rock that kept him afloat above the darkness. Some people say they feel like they’re falling when they lose a loved one, but that’s a lie. Clint feels stagnant, like he’s stopped moving in a world that’s spinning on. He feels like his heart is rending in two, and it’s paralysing. The wind picks up, swirling in silent agony to cocoon him and the Indian woman with four arms, to shield them from the world outside.

Death looks at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. For the first time in the decades, she looks remorseful. One hand comes to rest on Clint’s head, and he lets it stay. Slowly, she takes the instrument- the lute, he realises - that’s strapped to her back, showing it to Clint.

“Do you know what this is?” She asks, her head tilting slightly as her three hands slowly tune the instrument.

Clint doesn’t respond. The wind howls.

“This was a gift, eons ago, from one that loved me. She is gone now, fled to a place that I do not know and that I cannot reach, and I grieve.” She continues, as the sun catches the tears, little droplets of grief, that run down both their faces. Her voice is measured, but layered with age and innumerable hardship. Clint can’t breathe, the weight of both their sorrow pressing down on him like a physical burden, and maybe it is. It’s as real as a knife to the gut, the pain lancing through your body as time slows to a crawl.

“Do you grieve?” She asks, and Clint gives a shaky nod. Death regards him, and raising her head, she plays the melody that heralds the song Clint knows so well, as the air abruptly falls to a standstill around him.

_Oh the snow it melts the soonest,_

_When the winds begin to sing,_

_And the corn that ripens fastest when,_

_The frosts are settling in._

_And when a young man tells me that,_

_My face he’ll soon forget._

_Before we part I’d better cry,_

_He’d be fain to follow it yet._

 

And Clint screams.

**Author's Note:**

> For those that are wondering, the song is an actual folk song in Ireland. It's called "The Snow it melts the Soonest", and can be found right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv_hasUk74Q


End file.
